


mine, and yours

by crowkag



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Anxiety, Awesome Pepper Potts, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Father-Son Relationship, Fuck Canon, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Insecure Peter Parker, Insecure Tony Stark, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Tony Stark Coparenting Peter Parker, Medical Inaccuracies, Mental Health Issues, NOT STARKER - Freeform, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, POV Tony Stark, Parent Tony Stark, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark-centric, Worried Tony Stark, and my favorite tag:, kinda sorta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27181475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowkag/pseuds/crowkag
Summary: “Is it Peter?”He was met with loaded silence. The anxiety spark became an anxiety plunge and twist.“Happy. Is itPeter?”“It’s… well. Who else would it be, right?”“Hogan.”He hated this. The spark, the plunge, the twist. The tension creeping from his shoulder blades, clawing down arms both flesh and metal, somehow, someway, and bunching up inside his palms. The hysteria of it all.“It’s—alright, I won’t sugarcoat it. The kid’s alive, but he got shot, Tony. Twice.”(or: Tony reunites with Peter in a less than ideal manner.)
Relationships: Happy Hogan & Tony Stark, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Pepper Potts, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Tony Stark, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark, plus multiple other combos of these characters
Comments: 69
Kudos: 442
Collections: The Best Irondad/Spiderson Fics, The Best Peter Parker Whump Fics, The Best of the Best MCU Fics





	mine, and yours

**Author's Note:**

> i really enjoy the "peter feels insecure and unsure of his relationship with tony after returning from the snap because tony has a quote unquote Real Kid so where does that leave him??" trope, and also the "coming back from being dead for years is very hard" trope, but there aren't really any universal tags for that, so Insecure Peter Parker it is.
> 
> warnings for: anxiety, some derealization elements, discussions of gunshot wounds/surgery/blood. also, a bit of visceral imagery used in describing tony stark's Emotions (Trademark). 
> 
> there is also cursing, because of course.
> 
> enjoy!! <3

_Sixteen missed calls from Happy Hogan._

The words mocked Tony, all twisted up inside his brain as he stared down at his phone, standing in the middle of a banquet hall’s oversized, maroon-and-gold bathroom.

None of this was his scene anymore. He’d sensed it the second he and Pepper had arrived, dressed to the nines with their arms looped together. The first camera flash of the night had shot off where sidewalk pavement met an unfurled red carpet, and the only thing ringing inside Tony’s head had been _I wish I was home right now._

But he’d been told this would be good for him. If he showed the world that he was okay, that he was healing, then maybe he’d get closer to believing it himself. And since he could take more than five steps now without feeling the need to pass out, why not show it off?

_Sixteen missed calls from Happy Hogan._

That was why not.

Tony stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror as he hit call, thinking distantly just how downright ugly he found its ornate Baroque frame, and held his breath until Happy picked up on the third ring.

“Fucking finally, Tony. Jesus Christ. I’ve been trying to reach you for over an hour.”

“Yeah, I know, I know.” Tony ducked his head when a toilet flushed behind him, making a point to avoid eye contact with the man emerging from the stall a beat later. Wandering to a far corner of the bathroom, he briefly pinched the bridge of his nose. He could hear the vibrating hum of violin strings through the wall and wondered for a moment what music Morgan’s babysitter had thrown on tonight while cooking dinner.

“I know,” he repeated. “Look, I’m really trying for Pepper right now. But I know. What’s going on?”

Happy’s sigh sounded too much like a wordless apology. It sent a multi-pronged spark of anxiety shooting through Tony’s midsection, and he tightened his fingers around his phone.

“Listen, Tony.” Oh, that wasn’t good. That was never a good way to start things off. “It’s, uh… Shit, I called you about a thousand times and I don’t even know where to begin. Uh, look, it’s—”

“Is it Peter?”

He was met with loaded silence. The anxiety spark became an anxiety plunge and twist.

“Happy. Is it _Peter_?”

“It’s… well. Who else would it be, right?”

“ _Hogan_.”

He hated this. The spark, the plunge, the twist. The tension creeping from his shoulder blades, clawing down arms both flesh and metal, somehow, someway, and bunching up inside his palms. The hysteria of it all.

“It’s—alright, I won’t sugarcoat it. The kid’s alive, but he got shot, Tony. Twice.”

Spark, plunge, twist, repeat. A solid punch to the solar plexus. A violent kick into his kneecaps. A fist around his throat. Tony leaned into the wall beside him, tried to straighten. Closed his eyes, tried to open them.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he choked out, and then he was moving, shooting past rows of urinals and stalls, past the ugly mirror, past the man who’d finished washing his hands and was now smoothing back the thinning hair atop his head.

He burst out of the bathroom and into a long, carpeted hallway, then turned a corner back out to the main hall. He had to. He had to move. He had to leave. Happy spoke in his ear all the while, managing to sound strained and calm at the same time.

“I was at his aunt’s place when he crawled through his bedroom window. We probably wouldn’t have known he was back if he hadn’t fallen coming in, and it was—it was _bad_ , Tony. He wasn’t spandexed up or anything, no way for his little suit voice to give us a heads-up, but he had his phone on him so... so I don't know. We had to take him to NYP and I’ve already got people on the NDA nonsense.”

Tony was a flurry of movement, pushing around bodies in sparkling clothes, barely registering the affronted looks as he shouldered and elbowed and slipped his way through the crowd. He knew he was there, knew he physically existed in some space of glitter and music and drinks, but his brain was flying away somewhere else. To a hospital on the other side of the city, where a kid that he loved with every speck of every atom in his entire body was caked through with blood. It was the unmistakable shine of strawberry-blonde hair by the bar that knocked him to reality long enough for his limbs to angle in the direction of Pepper, and he swerved around a journalist asking some businessmen a question on post-Return real estate. The words sounded warped and gooey against his eardrums.

“His surgery wrapped up a couple hours ago,” Happy was saying, and Tony’s brain malfunctioned at that but he had to _keep moving._ “He’s stable now. Probably should have led with that. I would have called you earlier, but the kid, he—well. I’m calling you now. That’s what matters.”

“ _I’ll_ decide what matters right now, Hogan,” Tony thought he heard himself snap. Happy gave another sigh, said something that Tony couldn’t be bothered to process as he came up behind his wife and laid a hand on her bare shoulder, causing her to turn around.

“Oh, I was wondering where you—what’s wrong?”

Tony stared at her. He tried to match her words with the movements of her mouth. He tried to differentiate her voice from Happy’s, still rumbling from his phone. Tried to distinguish between human speech and the omnipresent din of the string orchestra, or the lights blinking and shining and bouncing in golden sheets across the room.

_He got shot. Twice. He got shot. Twice. It was bad, Tony. Surgery. Stable now. It was bad, Tony. He got shot. Twice. Twice. Twice._

“Tony?” Pepper gripped his left wrist with one hand, brought the other up to cup his cheek. He blinked, and focused in on the worried pinch between her eyebrows. “Honey, what happened? Who are you on the phone with?”

Words filtering through his brain slower than he felt himself forming them, he managed to answer, “Happy,” and heard his former bodyguard make a questioning “huh?” on the other end of the line. “It’s Happy. He’s, uh—he’s at the hospital.”

Pepper’s eyebrows shot up far, but Tony forced himself to continue before she could ask anything.

“Not him. Happy’s okay. He’s at the hospital, but—Pep. Pepper, it’s Peter. Happy told me he got shot. I have to leave. I have to—”

His wife was already taking the phone from his fingers and pressing it up to her ear, designer handbag tucked under her armpit. She laced her fingers with his and gave one reassuring squeeze after another as she guided them across the hall, making a hard beeline for the entryway.

“Happy? It’s Pepper… Presbyterian Queens? Okay. We’ll be there soon… Yes, thank you. Heading to the car now.”

Tony tried to match his breathing up with the contracting of Pepper’s hand. Four squeezes in, five squeezes hold, six squeezes out. He looked up, and in one blink he saw a gigantic, crystal chandelier swaying and trembling over the foyer. In another, he watched his breath puff out as ice crystals onto the frigid October air, while the bursting whites of cameras fired off in his peripheries.

In another, he was eyeing the tip of a skyscraper.

Another, the worried blue eyes of his beautiful wife.

Another, the roof arching over the passenger side seat of a car.

Another, those words.

_Sixteen missed calls from Happy Hogan._

****

Peter had been different since the beginning of After. Since the second Snap. The Blip. Unblip. Reversal. The Return. Whatever people called it.

To Tony, it was After. Before and After.

After and Before.

Now and Then.

Peter now, Peter then.

Peter as dust. Peter as gushing gunshot wounds. Ash or metal.

At least as ash, he’d wanted Tony around.

Here, on Earth—five years later, _After_ —he never called. Never reached out. Not to Tony, not to anyone.

It was petty. It was petty and gross. Not for Peter, but for Tony. _He_ was petty and gross, he knew, and thinking these selfish, disgusting thoughts made him want to vomit. Feeling how they cut into his stomach, peeled away the lining to his lungs, sliced into his blood vessels, all visceral and heart-stopping, gory and blistering, pain pain _pain_.

It hurt. It _hurt_ that Peter went away. That Tony had gotten him back only to have him disappear again, and not just from his life. Everybody had taken note of it.

Peter Parker was different. He’d changed.

Tony watched buildings blur by as he spiraled into himself, and he _despised_ what he was doing. Peter had been shot. Twice, twice. It had been bad. He hadn’t been wearing the suit. He hadn’t called anybody. He’d needed surgery. His identity would be toast to all the surgeons and nurses who’d worked on him. They had to know he was enhanced. How could they not?

So Tony should be nothing but worried. Nothing but relieved that Peter was alive, that he was stable at the very least. And Tony _was_ all those things. Worried, relieved.

But instead of pure selflessness, he harbored anger, too. The teeth-gritting, jaw-popping kind. Anger and hurt and terror, because tomorrow marked seven months since the battle.

Seven months since Tony had last seen Peter Parker in the flesh.

And they’d be reuniting over the metal railings of some cheap hospital bed.

****

After reaching the emergency room lobby, it was a rush down hallways and frantic pushes of elevator buttons. Pepper’s heels clicked on the linoleum, Tony’s fingers tugged at the sleeves of his suit jacket, a regular cacophony of physical movement and nervous tics, but they kept their voices silenced. The air ran tight and heavy when they gripped each other’s hands during the elevator ride, a prayer forming where their skin met.

_Please let him be okay. He’s stable, but please let him be okay. Let him come home. Please._

They stepped out onto the long stretch of in-patient suites the same moment May exited a restroom a short way down to their right. Her clothes were rumpled, forehead and shirt and the graying roots of her hair dampened by spare drops of sink water, and she noticed them with a relieved widening of red-rimmed eyes.

“Oh, thank goodness,” she breathed as they approached. “Harold told me he called, but I didn’t know how soon you’d get here.”

The hand she placed on Tony’s arm gave away how badly she was trembling as he leant down to return her cheek kisses, right to left. Pepper pulled her into a hug quickly after, making a smoothing gesture down the hair at her neck.

“We’re here, May. We started leaving as soon as we heard what happened.” She pulled away, keeping a firm grip on May’s elbows as she looked her in the eyes. “How is he?”

Giving a small smile that was probably meant to come off as convincing, May sniffled.

“He’s about as well as can be expected. We knew the Compound was too far away so I called Helen on the drive over, had her deliver the anesthesia and painkillers he’d need. Now it feels like half the staff here knows he’s got powers, which will be a whole separate issue for him, and…” She trailed off, her hair like curtains framing the sides of her face when she lowered her head, shaking it slowly. Tony placed a hand on her shoulder and said nothing.

“We’ll get it all sorted out, May,” Pepper reassured in a hushed tone. “For Peter.”

May reached up to briefly rest a palm over Tony’s knuckles.

“Yes. For Peter.”

Pepper quirked her lips into a soothing smile, looped her arm through May’s and tugged her close to her hip.

“Let’s go see him now, okay? If we’re allowed, that is.”

“Oh, you are. He’s conked out but that’s his super meds at work.” May chuckled lightly as they started walking, Tony falling in on her other side. “He woke up about an hour ago, way too high to make sense of anything.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Pepper mused.

Tony didn’t laugh along. He felt he probably should, that he was supposed to do _something_ in contribution to a sense of normalcy. As if Peter hadn’t been shot. Twice. Outside of the suit. Hadn’t called anybody.

But he made no sound, just walked alongside and kept his face blank. May and Pepper weren’t saying much either, the twist of their heads toward each other giving away that they were having some silent conversation about him with nothing but their eyes. He knew that this uncharacteristic silence of his was now sitting on a long list of tonight’s worries, and he might’ve felt guilty if he wasn’t so preoccupied with not knowing how to feel at all. The hospital looked like mush around him, a blurry collage of clean whites and blues far beyond the tip of his nose, a space growing and shrinking in tandem with the jostling of the knot in his stomach.

Peter was here somewhere, a direct consequence of various circumstances that were stubborn sticking points in Tony’s mind. He couldn’t stop rolling back to it, to the knowledge that Peter hadn’t requested help. Seven months, and he’d refused to reach out for something as dire as a _gunshot wound._ Why? Why wouldn’t he? Why the fuck wouldn’t he? So Tony was aware of the morphing whites and blues, of May and Pepper, but all he _felt_ was red. Blood, pain, and anger.

But then May led them into a room at the tail end of the hallway and all those mixed-up emotions dispersed.

“Wow, you got here fast. I’m more impressed than I should be,” came Happy’s voice, and he was raising himself out of an uncomfortable-looking armchair to join them at the door. Tony registered him as nothing more than a flash of movement. Pepper’s arm brushed his side, May was stepping back to make some room, and all of it was just movement.

Tony only saw Peter, bandages wrapped around his right shoulder and left arm.

He looked taller.

Less gangly.

Must have hit a small growth spurt in the past few months.

Not that it was all too easy to tell with him knocked unconscious in a hospital bed.

But Tony knew.

Breathing a sigh of relief and moving forward, he put everything else at his back as he sank into the armchair Happy had vacated. The cushion was warm under him, the room cold around him, and Peter was alive in front of him.

Tony took one lax hand in his own—just to make sure, just to make _sure_ —and tilted his head down when he felt the pulse point inside his kid’s wrist beating out the pattern zigzagging across the heart monitor. Leaning forward, he brought that same hand higher, meeting in the middle so Peter’s fingers curled against his forehead. They were definitely too frigid for Tony’s tastes—he would have to ask somebody to raise the temperature in here—but they were tangible. Physical, solid proof that things could be okay.

_Oh, bud_ , he whispered inside his head. _I missed you. I wish we were doing this differently._

A soft grip squeezed the nape of Tony’s neck, the fingers instantly recognized as Pepper’s. She pressed a lingering kiss to his temple while Happy and May rounded out to Peter’s other side. The three of them spoke in quiet tones about things that were different in topic yet similar in concern. Blood tests and legal matters, a scheduled transfer to the Compound and what to tell Midtown staff when it inevitably came to that, all matters related to Peter and nothing but.

Tony stayed silent, allowing himself to take deep breaths, in and out. The strain in his chest ebbed away, eased by the sensation of his forehead against the slightly bruised skin of his kid’s knuckles.

****

It was around 2 AM when Peter stirred.

Everybody else had left together about an hour ago, with Happy and Pepper putting on their “take no bullshit” faces before going to discuss NDAs with lawyers and hospital personnel. Tony had asked May with a rough voice if she would be staying—it was the first thing he’d said since arriving at the hospital—and her mouth had twisted in consideration, eyes glancing between him and Peter with a glint.

“Actually, I should run back to the apartment,” she’d replied. “Grab some of his overnight stuff before he’s booted upstate.”

Now it was just him at Peter’s bedside, watching his kid’s nose scrunch up in the way it always did whenever he drifted back into consciousness. An unintelligible noise rose in the back of his throat, drawing a smile to Tony’s face.

“Hey, kiddo,” he murmured, rubbing a quick thumb along the side of Peter’s hand, which he hadn’t let go of since grabbing it earlier. “You coming back to us?”

“Mm… Wha’?”

Tony chuckled at the garbled nonsense.

“Take your time. Not like I have anywhere else to be.”

At the sound of his voice, Peter’s eyebrows lifted and furrowed. His mouth twitched, head lolling lazily along his pillow in the direction of the noise. Tony leaned in, anticipating the moment when he got to see those brown eyes again for the first time in months. Peter sniffed loudly, stretched out his neck, then lifted his eyelids to the barest sliver.

Tony had expected them to widen, though not in the way they did then. He hadn’t foreseen the alarm that cracked into the whites of Peter’s eyes, nor the way he shot up and yanked his hand from Tony’s grip like he’d been burnt. Like he’d seen a fucking _ghost_.

Jerking away in shock, Tony pressed deep into the backrest of his armchair, barely given enough time to collect himself before Peter was speaking in a rush that bordered on hysteric.

“Why are you here?” The heavy painkillers still pumping their way through his bloodstream had the words blurring into one another, but they were coherent and purposeful in a way that struck like harpoons, almost as if he’d practiced for this moment. “I told them… I told Happy I didn’t wanna see you.”

Tony’s mouth opened slightly, dumb and empty and useless. He knew he must look stupid, stunned into silence like this. He certainly _felt_ stupid.

Really, what had he been expecting after all this time?

To sing Kumbaya?

He’d had his hopes, but… no. Not here. Not right now.

Something stern set into his chest. Not bitter, or angry. Just stern. He snapped his mouth shut into a tight line, straightened up in his seat, lowered his brows.

“Well, he called me anyway.”

Peter flinched at that, holding Tony’s gaze for a moment longer until his eyes traveled down to his hands, where his fingers gripped tight around the bedsheets. Tony sniffed, took his first real glance around the hospital room since he’d arrived, at the monitors blinking out vitals and the bottles of cotton swabs and antiseptic at the sink by the door.

He felt stupid, yes. But he wasn’t the one bandaged and laid up in bed for _being_ stupid.

“Pete, you’re…” He took a deep breath to steel himself, returning his hardened gaze to the teenager in front of him. “You are supposed to call somebody. Remember that rule?”

Peter winced again, attention still directed at the thin blanket covering his legs. Tony continued on.

“You _have_ to call someone when this shit happens. Me, or May, or Happy, _anybody_. Suit or no suit, and ‘I didn’t have my phone’ won’t cut it because Happy _told me_ earlier that it was with you. Cold shoulders or any sort of argument, any attitudes, that is all put aside the moment you get hurt. Don’t tell me you forgot, kid. You’re smarter than this, come on.”

Peter wasn’t budging, and Tony could feel tiny bubbles of frustration, of desperation, forming in his midsection and rising into his chest. He wanted to take his kid’s hand again. He wanted to grip him by the shoulders. Wanted to turn his face up, wanted to shake some common sense into that genius intellect of his, wanted to ask _why_ , wanted to—

“I’m not your kid.”

The world bugged out.

It had been spoken so quietly, a whisper, a hiss of air. And the room, the entire building beyond it, down to the foundation and then spreading outwards, it all glitched. It jolted.

Tony blinked under the sudden weight of it.

“What?”

Peter worked his mouth side to side, next words coming out a little louder than before.

“You always… You always call me kid. But I’m not.” His head raised up, _finally_ , to stare Tony dead on. “I’m not your kid.”

A beat, then another, tense and dangerous. And in the next moment, the bravado drained. Peter visibly crumpled, head twisting around to one side, throat blocked off by something impossibly resigned.

“I’m not yours.”

Tony was frozen in place. Peter started mumbling about other things, about a real kid, a real home, a real family. About moving on. Moving away. About five years. About differences, spatial and emotional and temporal, and Tony couldn’t process any of it. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t, he—

He didn’t understand. He _didn’t understand._ None of what Peter said made sense. It refused to click. He heard the words, could string them along to know they fit together in rules of grammar, of syntax, of logical semantics—pronoun, adverb, pronoun, noun, _I’m not your kid_ —but he _didn’t understand._

His brain hurt.

_I’m not your kid._

It made his brain fucking _hurt_ , like it was being shoved through a strainer.

Because Peter—he and Peter, they—

They’d been born into different circles. Different lifestyles. Different places. Different realities. Tony had probably been… he remembered that he had been attending some loud and pulsing party when Peter was born, and he hadn’t been aware in those early, liquor-hazed hours of the morning, halfway across the globe in Barcelona. He hadn’t known, hadn’t been cognizant that something in his life had changed that night, had shifted into place like a gear shuddering into the correct grooves of all the other parts around it.

And all those years following, all those moments leading up to that day in the Parker residence, every single party and fuck up and boldfaced headline. All that he’d sunken himself into, continuing to exist as unaware, not knowing, not being cognizant, not paying attention to that gear as it rolled and rolled and rolled. None of it stopped the fact that there was no galaxy, no universe, no _timeline_ where Peter Parker wasn’t… where he _wasn’t_ —

“Peter, look at me.”

It came out harsher than he intended, and he reigned himself in with a breath. He wasn’t mad. Not in the slightest, and not anymore. No, he was terrified. His kid was saying all these things, these horrible and awful and untrue things, and he wasn’t looking up.

So Tony was fucking _terrified_ for him.

He tried again.

“Peter Benjamin Parker, you turn that curly head of yours and you look at me right this instant, understand?”

And he supposed that not even superheroes could resist the pull of a Dad Voice sitting at seven years in the making, because the kid _did_ look. He peeked up through sleep-mussed hair and eyelashes and a glaze of vulnerability, grief and shock and perhaps hope, minute and trembling but still there.

_I’m not your kid._

_Yeah, right._

“Now, you listen to me. I don’t know how or why these thoughts got in your head, but I know for a fact that they aren’t _you_ talking. Because I know you. May knows you. And May and I? We talk, _just_ as we did before. We never stopped talking, and I know you know that. She says you haven’t been yourself for months, and even though I haven’t exactly been able to pop in for hellos—” he wagged the fingers of his metal prosthetic in front of the scarred bunches of skin along the side of his face, “—I’ve been reasonably inclined to think the same. Sorry to announce that your purposeful radio silence hasn’t flown under my radar. But I am here now, so I’m gonna lay it all out, loud and clear.”

He leant in, holding Peter’s gaze, unblinking.

“This ‘I am not your kid’ stuff? Double-reverse Star Wars style? Yeah, that’s bullshit. Utter, complete bullshit. And I’m gonna stop it now. I will tell it like it is, that _you_ , Peter Parker—” he jabbed an index finger in the air at Peter’s chest, “—you _are_ my kid, kid. And I— _we_. May and I, and Pepper, Rhodey, Happy, we _know_ that you wouldn’t have it any other way. So whatever your brain’s been cooking up for you these past few months, I am the all expenses paid free trip to tell it that it’s _wrong_.”

Peter’s chin had lifted up as Tony spoke. His fingers no longer made a death grip in his sheets and the panic seeping from the corners of his eyes was slinking away, still noticeable but nowhere near as prominent. Exhaustion bloomed in its wake. Relief.

Tony released a soft breath, smiled on the conclusion of his exhale and placed a hand on the edge of the mattress. He let his voice come out gentler as he continued.

“You are my kid, and I am your guardian. Your parent, your mentor, your Mister Stark, your Tony, whatever you fancy. Mine, and yours. No take-backsies, no exchanges or refunds, I don’t care if you have the receipt. Capiche?”

Peter’s lower lip wobbled as he nodded.

“Capiche.”

It was the first thing he’d said all night that didn’t send a lance straight through Tony’s chest, but he was still a bit curled in on himself, and that wouldn’t stand. So Tony lifted his hand up and reached forward, Peter keeping his gaze on it all the while. His eyes tried to follow its path as a curl was carefully pushed away from his forehead, and his breath hitched in a way that made Tony’s heart crack when the edge of a calloused fingertip brushed into his hairline, as if this was all a dream. As if he expected Tony to have walked out of the room by now.

Carefully, determinedly, Tony moved his hand down to cup Peter’s cheek, thumb rubbing under the corner of his eye. He waited for Peter to relax into the touch, to press into his palm like he always did Before, and when he did—when his head slumped to the side with a soft exhale—Tony scratched lightly behind his ear to grab his attention.

That wide stare locked back onto his face as Tony came forward an inch more.

“Buddy. I love you, okay?”

Peter closed his eyes.

“Okay.”

“I love you _so much_ , Peter.”

“Okay.”

“Do you believe me?”

Peter choked on a sob and said nothing. Tony allowed him a moment, the constriction in his chest cutting past the border of painful.

“Can I give you a hug?” he asked after a beat.

Part of him didn’t expect the nod, so his heart sang when he got it, Peter’s voice all nasally and cloyed with unshed tears.

“ _Please_.”

****

Tomorrow, they would talk about it.

Tomorrow, Peter would put into words all the thoughts that had bunched up inside his brain since being brought back.

Tony would hear about the lonely days, the terrifying nights. All about the fears and emptiness. All about this overwhelming sense of not belonging.

There would be an “It’s okay” for every “I’m sorry,” an “I love you” to chase on the end of each “I’m here.”

Tomorrow, May would come back from the apartment with two duffel bags slung over her shoulders, both puffed up with more clothes than necessary for a weekend at the Compound.

She would heavily suggest a couple weeks at the lakehouse after Peter got properly healed up, and Peter would only hesitate for a split-second before nodding his head in quiet, pleased agreement.

For tonight, though?

Tonight, Tony would just hold his kid while he slept.

Tonight, they would get their rest.

**Author's Note:**

> i be out here, loathing the "you can rest" line as it relates to a mentally ill character "needing" to die before they can be at peace with their trauma. we don't put up with that shit under my roof. 
> 
> also, it took me a bit to decide whether tony would be gentler or more firm with peter during their talk, but then i considered what i personally prefer whenever my mental health is low and decided "both, both is good." 
> 
> Anyways. thank you all for reading!! comments and kudos pay my rising tuition costs.
> 
> yall can come find me on instagram! @souptrader
> 
> i also kind of, sort of revived my tumblr (frazers), big emphasis on "kind of, sort of"
> 
> that is all from me, mwah. <3000


End file.
